The Man In The Shadows
by TheHiddenMemory
Summary: No one knew his name. He would emerge and retreat with stealth and destruction both in equal measure.
1. Prologue

_A/N: Can be AU or future. Note that I have not watched any of season 5._

~o~

On the surface nothing had changed. Civilization, _humanity_ , and its laws of governance remained, in all practicality, unchanged. The reality, however, was something far bleaker. The exterior was but an illusion that denied the presence of an unprecedented enemy.

And therein lay the precipice of its domination. That it could instigate itself so prudently, so surgically, shaking the very core, the foundations, while the surface appeared abiding was an exemplar of true power. It created its own devil and then offered itself up in the form of a savior, a good _Samaritan_ , instilling a fear to defy reason and planting roots such that its deceit would go unnoticed until it was far, far, too late.

Insidious, cunning, and megalomaniac to the extreme it was a force of unparalleled proportions. War of a tangible kind could barely scratch its surface. It could not be adequately fought with ordnance or hunted down and assassinated in ways that were proverbial in nature. It did not exist as a single target to be sought. It was ubiquitous. A faceless enemy. It could not be defeated by conventional means for the singular reason that it was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, not human.

Artificial intelligence was its classification. And in a cruel twist of irony, a connotation to its faux exterior, _Samaritan_ , whose literary origins were the parable of the Good Samaritan, was its name. Though it no longer operated in anonymity, already far too enmeshed in civilization for such trivial impediments to remain a deterrent, there were few who dared speak its name aloud. To do so in censure of any kind was to seal one's fate. Samaritan's bigotry was indeed a harsh reality not to be tested.

And in New York, surveillance state, its place of birth, depravity was most keenly felt.

~o~

Its inhabitants were nothing of the uncommon kind. It was, after all, a clear spring afternoon in Queensbridge Park. There was the solitary teen retreating to the far corner of the park, earbuds shoved too far into his ears. There was the elderly couple, walking hand in hand along the river view path. There was the man with a golden retriever and oversized sunglasses. The two pre-teen girls, backpacks over one shoulder, phones in hand. The boy at the picnic table jabbing at a tablet device. The woman with the colorful umbrella. The elderly man on the bench. The cyclist.

To an external observer nothing had changed. Because one could look and not see. Touch and not feel. Listen and not hear. And it was far, far too subtle. _Recondite_ beyond comprehension, and all the more puissant for it. Because behind the unchanging veneer was a reality that was all too real, a malaise that existed not in what was present but rather in what was not. It existed in words not spoken and eyes not seeking. In heads bent lower and feet not lingering. In faces not seen and smiles half felt. In games not played and laughter not heard. It existed in the untouched baseball glove in front of the boy. In his mother's silence. It existed in the empty bench beside the old-fashioned lamppost where Mr. Briggs, the elderly blind man, brazen of character but kind of heart, had sat every afternoon and opined at length to any who would listen. It existed in the missing easel angled just so, where Maggie, the retired librarian, had sat watching, creating, with a marveled tranquility.

It existed in what was missing. It existed in what had been lost. And it existed in the truth that lurked behind everything it touched. The truth that while nothing had changed, everything had changed. That while no one was screaming, everyone was screaming. That while the people walked freely they walked in chains.


	2. A Child's Impunity

"But I don't _like_ it, Mommy."

The little girl's bright orange hair was the most incongruous presence in Queensbridge Park that afternoon.

Or perhaps it was more than just the color of her hair.

" _Elva_." The girl's mother's attempts were hushed and edged with something inexplicable, a weariness, a suppressed kind of urgency.

Only eight-year-old Elva did not understand.

Her small lips were pressed sullenly and her brows were pinched as she looked and questioned and waited in askance with an unblemished simplicity that only a child could.

Waited for an answer that would never come.

Nia gripped her daughter's hand, softly tugging—around the importunate puddle lingering from the morning's storm. Around the elderly man on the bench.

Nia recognized the withered stranger's stare, locked on them as it was, his penetrating eyes moving from her loquaciousness daughter to her own. She saw the warning behind the disapproving scowl. Behind the aloofness. The desperate look of fear. Of knowing.

But Nia knew too. Better than anyone, Nia knew.

There was a darkness, in this stranger's eyes, a sweeping impotence that mirrored Nia's own. Her unspoken response was of quite acknowledgement, of thanks, because there was altruism in his attempt, in his warning, where his eyes dared to look too long where others did not.

She urged her daughter onwards.

But Elva was too stubborn, too willful. A child's impunity.

Her pink backpack bounced up and down, discordant against her unruly curls as she tugged back on her mother's hand. "They took Crysta's daddy, Mommy. Just like Mrs. Novak. They _took_ him."

" _Elva_." She gripped her daughter's arms.

And the lies were poison on her tongue as she spoke. As she told her daughter her best friend's father had left to perform his duty, for his country, to keep them safe. Not that he had been labeled a deviant. Not that he had been guilty of nothing but rectitude and refusing to conform to the tenuous safety of the very lies she was speaking.

And each lie told since its ascendancy had compounded upon itself. Each lie more nebulous, less convincing as moral depravity grew. Each lie burned stronger with the bitter taste of resentment for all _it_ had taken from them.

There was an emptiness now, as Nia looked at her daughter. Even as her words implored, implored to understand what could not be understood, there was an irreparable void of something lost.

Because it was already too late.

And how far had its roots grown that it could crawl beneath every such principle built and rob a child?

But it could.

It had.

And it would.

The little girl had fallen silent now, if only for a moment. Perhaps she had finally sensed something in her mother's tone.

Nia stood stooped before her daughter. A flock of pigeons soared over the Greenway as a cyclist road up the path. A man walking unhurriedly, his hands in his pockets, dared to give Nia a brief but cordial nod as he passed. A second cyclist moved past, disturbing the air, ruffling the pages of the newspaper sitting abandoned on a nearby park bench. And Nia wondered how it was that they could all so easily lapse to the pretense when she felt every breath it took like a cancer seeping through her veins, unobstructed and unrivaled.

Ignorance, _avoidance_ , was a refuge long extinguished.

Especially for Nia.

The newspaper ruffled again, its pages moving insistently in the breeze, taunting in the face of its triumph.

Nia needn't look at it. She had already read every headline, just as she had every other day, the bustle of the newsroom as natural to her as breathing.

Nia knew what was written within its pages.

And she knew what was not.

The pages stilled. The headlines boasted thwarted attacks in the voice of the savior that had created them and spoke of upcoming elections in the illusion of democracy.

It was perhaps amongst the most frightening of indicators, that this medium, the medium of the people, the glue that held them together, the eyes and ears, the front lines that questioned, translated and exposed, had been so infected, its voice robbed of truth, its face transformed to a spurious reflection in the visage of Samaritan.

There had been those who had fought back, those who had resisted. But Samaritan had been inaugurated by the people themselves, born of a fear that could not be contained. It had fed off this fear, fostered it, exploited it like a skilled shyster until the people saw truth where there were lies, enemies where there were none, terror where there was subterfuge, so blind had they been that they had welcomed a monster of their own creation with open arms and marveled at its brilliance whilst it hunted in silence—while it fabricated truths and reason to acts that had none.

Until no more reason remained.

Insurgents had become terrorists. Insurgents had become deviants. Deviants had become outliers. Deviants had become men, women—any who would oppose it. Deviants had become those who would not conform. Deviants had become any it could exploit. Deviants had become men, women. And children.

What reason remained then?

But too late they had realized. Like the fear that had created it, once unleashed it could not be contained.

It bought silence with fear. Loyalty with dominance. It lied, it cheated, it plundered. It endowed whilst it destroyed. Cured whilst it infected. Enacted genocide to alleviate famine. It slaughtered tantamount to the very calamitous acts it existed to prevent and called it by a different name. It toyed and manipulated, nefarious and expedient in its means to assimilate human behavior. And all the while it spread like a noxious disease, suffocating from the inside out, stealth and brilliance immeasurable. And it took. It took until nothing remained.

~o~

Darkness had pressed down without prelude, where unforeseen clouds slid the sky closed like a gentle giant would close its eyes to weep. Perhaps there was comfort in its solitude. Perhaps not.

A car door slammed from further up Queensbridge Park Greenway. A jogger hurried to find shelter as the first drops hit the pavement. Only a few stragglers remained.

The newspaper lay abandoned on the park bench, the rain hitting its surface in a soft pattering of increasing rhythm, its pages stilling as they dampened. On the neighboring bench the old man still sat. Uncompromising though he appeared, one ought to look closer; perhaps he had seen; perhaps he had felt—because in his lap his hands shook.

Lying discarded on its side beneath the newspaper, the patter of rain louder where it hit its plastic surface, was a child's pink backpack.

Somewhere in the distance, the gentle giant wept.


	3. The Panopticon

The property had been ceded for its helm. Seized and infiltrated without preamble. Already it was named. The Panopticon. An apt denomination—in flagrant capability if not in architecture—for the home base of the omniscient superintelligence. Its location in upstate New York was secluded, secure, and a judicious number of miles from Midtown. The site was a 50-acre plateau of rolling green lawn. The edifice itself was baronial in size but nondescript in style. As was its scantly adorned grounds. Its encompassing presence sat portentously austere. No battalion of heavily armed men. No towering fences. Such would be a pittance. Infantile. A child guarding a fortress. An anchor in a tsunami. A far greater kind of imperviousness, one not achieved by armies or walls made of wood or stone claimed its every inch and beyond. It was the eyes and ears not seen. It pressed down as a heavy, oppressive weight. Invisible. And stifling.

Until one learned to breathe to its cadence.

Or caved beneath it.

Evelyn Brant had learned to breathe.

The tires crunched and spewed up debris as the vehicle moved up the macadam path and stopped near the building's front. An armored BMW 760Li. Two men primly dressed in suits emerged. Agents. They spared her no glance, though she stood near. A bag of gravel mulch was at her feet, a pair of clippers in her gloved hands. A grounds worker. Insignificant. Irrelevant.

She waited.

A woman was hustled from the vehicle's backseat. A new arrival.

The woman was dressed in business attire: a suit and skirt ensemble with two-inch pumps, though the suit and shirt underneath were rumpled and creased, and her blond hair was escaping from its confines in messy tendrils. Evelyn noted the bruise on her cheek but the woman appeared otherwise unharmed.

She was shouting as the agents flanked her. Her voice was fierce, with conviction, assertiveness. A journalist maybe, Evelyn guessed.

She spoke of her rights. Evelyn could have told her not to bother.

She threatened what she would do when she returned, what she would expose. Evelyn could have told her she would not be returning.

No one returned.

She was vociferating obscenities now as the agents hauled her up the front steps. She was struggling. A blow hit its mark. She crumpled against the top step.

Her jacket had torn. She did not see what came loose. The object fluttered and then landed gently on the bottom step.

She was dragged upward.

Then she was gone.

The door closed behind with a heavy inevitability.

Evelyn waited. The sky was overcast and the air was still.

Carefully, she stepped from the solitary rosebush toward the fallen object. A piece of paper of some kind. She bent to retrieve it.

No. Not paper. A photograph.

Evelyn stared down at the little boy's face looking up from the glossy surface. The background was a patterned blue sky. A school photo. There was no mistaking the resemblance. The child had the woman's long face and fair coloring. Evelyn wondered what he would think when his mother never came home.

She folded the photo and slipped it into her pocket. She would return it to the woman when the chance arose. When she was cleaning near the holding rooms she would find the woman's room and slide it underneath the door. Tonight. Before it would be too late.

Evelyn turned. The little boy's face hovered in her vision. So did his Mother's. So did the others. She remembered them all.

The date on the back of the photo had indicated it had been taken a month prior. The boy had looked no more than four years old.

One thought burned in Evelyn's mind, sudden and unexpectedly devastating. It was ephemeral, but it crashed down on her carefully constructed subsistence.

He'd only been three.

He'd only been three years old when it had happened. He would not remember. He would not remember the world as it had been.

He would not remember a world when he'd been free.

Evelyn stood there and tucked it all away, closing it off, sealing it into the black box in the corners of her mind. Her eyes swept the expansive grounds, into the approaching shadows of the evening. Searching.

Maybe today, she thought. Maybe the woman with the little boy.

But, no. Evelyn finished her duties for the day, and evening moved to night and to morning. There was nothing. She did not hear the high-pitched alarm, the rushing feet, the angry voices.

No, not today.

~o~

It was raining when the next one arrived.

Long torrential sheets were plummeting the windows and doors of the building in rapid succession. It was late. Evelyn was working a double shift. The atrium was scantly lit and deserted when she wheeled the janitorial cart past the building's front entrance. One of the wheels was bent at an awkward angle and made a dull thumping noise of protest as it moved across the marble floor. She stopped just past the entrance. There was the sound of car doors slamming, a few distant shouts muffled in the downpour.

The three figures emerged as darkened blurred wraiths when they approached the steps. Two agents. They dragged the man between them.

This one was different to the last.

He was conscious yet he hung listlessly, as if held up only by the thinnest thread set to break at any moment. He was not dressed in business attire as the woman had been. He wore a polo shirt with shorts and sandals – as if he'd been having a family picnic or barbeque before they had come.

There was no recalcitrance, no demands or threats. He did not speak at all. His wet, dark, curly hair hung over his forehead, and the skin on his face was already blotched and swollen with bruises.

The agents dragged him into the building, the damp soles of their polished oxfords echoing a screech-like sound into the open space, their suits still hanging prim even with water bleeding from the hems. They dropped him callously and spoke disjointedly into their earpieces.

The man made no attempt to thwart his own fall. He hit the stone, and his eyes stared sightlessly. It was as if he had been robbed of something vital, something that could not be returned.

But it was none of this that had Evelyn abandoning her cart and moving with sudden purpose. Her mind knew it was foolish, _fruitless_ , but her feet had moved without conscious violation. Because this part, this piece of her, was sacrosanct, so ingrained was it that even if all else were stripped, it would remain.

She'd dropped to her knees where the stranger lay, and the two agents had looked down at her with their cold, dour faces, first mildly surprised by the sudden intrusion, then amused that she believed her words of interest.

The man required immediate medical attention, she'd told them.

The sepsis would kill him without it, she'd assured them. Tonight. He would not survive the night unaided. They'd looked down at her with something worse than hate.

Indifference.

It was no more and no less than that of their master.

When they'd dragged their charge up between them again, one of them had spared her a glance.

"And what would you know?" he'd sneered. "You're no _doctor_."

She'd stood there. That life, once hers, was bereft. Stolen. One of the many Samaritan had purloined. But her mind screamed the words, a shattered shard of truth she could not speak.

 _Yes I am._

~o~

It was evening. The rain continued to bleed down the windows, fast and relentless. Again Evelyn waited.

Maybe today, she thought. Maybe the silent man with the unseeing eyes.

But morning came, and agents came and went in casual accord. The monster smiled upon them in victory.

No, not today.

~o~

A boy. A child.

He wore velcro shoes on his feet— small like the rest of him. His eyes were cast down to them as he dragged them forward through the long hallway, his movements stilted and vacant.

Behind him, the agent's face was drawn in a tight line, irate at the lack of pace allowed by the child's much shorter stride. Fleetingly the boy's eyes had risen to meet Evelyn's as he past, not seeking, not pleading, but empty, with hints of what remained.

Evelyn had been a trauma doctor. No stranger to devastation, suffering, or loss, she carried with her a graveyard; padded and sheltered she'd bore the burden.

Yet she only had to look. She only had to look at this little boy, dark eyes swathed with an unimaginable seclusion, to know worse. As she did each time.

Each time they brought a child.

The boy moved past.

His intelligence was preeminent, Evelyn knew. Samartian was ruthless but never indiscriminate, and it selected its acquisitions as in a meritocracy. It sought high mental acuity. It sought eidetics. It sought. It foraged. It foraged young, unbroken, unconditioned minds.

And it broke them.


	4. The Man In The Shadows

No one knew his name. He would emerge and retreat with stealth and destruction both in equal measure. An angel of light and dark alike with the color of justice and the face of humanity. His appearances were objectionably sporadic and sparse such that the cynical disputed he existed at all, if not his methods. An urban legend, they would say, projected by desperate minds seeking a savior in times of terror, despair, and injustice.

If such a man existed, after all, why did he save so few? If one man was exempt from the eyes of the enemy why did he save one but not another? How was he exempt from such overshadowing omniscience as that of Samaritan? To singularly escape its agents, or the walls of the Panopticon, while no easy feat, was so short-lived it was to not escape at all. For it was Samaritan's eye, not structures or soldiers that imprisoned the people. Where were the hunted to hide in a world where all were indexed, filed, and tracked? Yet if the stories were believed, this man walked in its shadows, and drew into them those he saved.

An unfathomable feat.

Unless the rumors spoke truth.

The existence of another. A rival. A rival intelligence. Not the second but the _first_ of their kind.

It had existed long before Samaritan's birth. A silent presence. Neither predator nor prey. Powerful but unaffected, it saw but did not take. Listened but did not speak. Transposed but did not dismantle.

Benevolence to Samaritan's malice.

Shield to Samaritan's sword.

This the people spoke of. In hushed tones of speculation and cynicism.

Evelyn Brant did not speculate. Evelyn knew.

Evelyn remembered.

Evelyn remembered the agents as they'd raided and seized.

Evelyn remembered the tall, inscrutable stranger. In silence and calm efficiency her captors had fallen, one by one, as puppets on a string. And he'd picked his way through the masses to pull her from the wreckage.

This, Evelyn remembered.

She remembered him as he'd stood before her, the apology in his words extraneous as he freed her from restraints with an empathy that belied the roughened exterior. A new identity. She would no longer be hunted, though she would take nothing and leave everything. It would shield her, but send her to the eye of the storm.

Far worse was the alternative, every day Evelyn saw. Every day Evelyn waited. Every day Evelyn waited for him to spare another.

And Evelyn remembered.

With a stillness and isolation he had stood. And she'd looked into his eyes and wondered just how many he had lost.


	5. Sanguine Horizon

It's quiet.

Too quiet.

It settles over the west end of the building and spreads. Unseen. Unforgiving.

In a long windowless corridor an agent stands sentry, unaware.

A shadow moves; so quickly it looks not to have moved at all.

The agent's hands flail upward pitifully. Too late. The arms are steel bands around his throat, unwavering. His eyes bulge and a soundless gasp escapes before he stills.

The figure looms, tall and lean and dark. His gloved hands lower the body to the polished floor. Methodical. Efficient.

Silent.

He steps past the now prone form, trench coat billowing a shroud of black in his wake.

The next one falls much like the last. The vantage allows for a less exposed flank, so this agent manages a hand to his weapon before it's ripped back with a telltale crack of bone and a cry smothered by the large gloved hand. The body goes slack.

The tall figure moves on.

~o~

It's a near identical corridor where Evelyn walks. In her hand is a crumpled piece of paper. There's a tremor to her fingers. Indelible in her mind she sees the newly empty rooms. The empty faces.

Her breath feels tight. She smoothes the paper and slides it into her pocket even when she knows she shouldn't.

Each day is hard. Some days are harder.

An agent pushes past her with a bark into his earpiece. He's agitated.

Agents are never agitated.

Evelyn turns. She senses rather than hears the shift.

A second agent darts past her after the first. Her pulse quickens and something leaps within her. She looks after them. Remembers the barked location. She decides. It's not really a decision at all.

She cuts to the right down a narrower corridor. She knows every corridor, every passage, every route. Every camera.

Her pace quickens. No, not a decision at all.

Down a dark hallway her footfalls resound back at her. The air is stale. She passes no one. No workers come this way. She supposes she ought not to either.

She reaches the west end of the building. The main hallway.

She knows before she sees.

The first one lies with his arms splayed outwards.

She does not know them by name. Never does she care to remember. Never do they care to remember hers.

She steps widely around the fallen form.

And the next.

And the next.

She does not see them. Never do they see her.

She does not look at the faces. No less soulless will they be.

She comes to a corridor crossing. Long, wide corridors with high ceilings and smooth terrazzo flooring. There's a window. It's twilight. The collision of day and night. A blood red horizon.

Adrenaline and something else beats in her chest. She can hear angry voices now. Agents.

She arrives at the open area with pillared archways and a winding staircase. Behind it are the kitchens. There's a seating area with stark white armchairs and a glass table.

The voices are growing louder.

She has a brief moment to contemplate the wisdom of her decision before several things happen near simultaneously. Bullets ricochet off a nearby marble pillar. A gloved hand is pushing her to the ground. " _Stay down_ ," the roughened voice orders. There's movement from above her. She presses herself down into the floor but her eyes follow the darkened figure that has appeared seeming from nowhere. A familiar stranger. _Today_ , she rejoices.

He's much the same as she remembers. Yet different in a way she can't place.

The way he moves is as she remembers. Unequaled. A fluidity. A practicality. A deadly grace. Special Forces, Evelyn has guessed. And something else.

He has moved to the corridor crossing, shoulder to the wall, pistol drawn. Waiting.

The agents move into sight. Two of them. They take aim. Not fast enough.

The two shots fired in succession hit their targets with the muted _plunk_ of a silenced weapon. The bodies fall in turn, cleanly, accurately.

Yes, Evelyn thinks. _And something else._

He rises from his crouched position, face unchanged. He lowers his weapon, but Evelyn senses his intrinsic and unfaltering awareness to all and everything around them.

Two down. More will come. More always come.

"You should go." His voice is low, raspy as if from disuse.

Evelyn swallows. There's leadenness in her limbs and a pounding in her veins. She does not have his equanimity. It takes her a moment to get her feet beneath her. She shakes her head. "I know the building." It's not an offer. A resolution.

He stares at her. Evelyn stares back. His face is blank, stony. Dangerous. But Evelyn is not easily swayed. She has spent day after day looking into empty faces. Empty souls.

His is not.

If she looks long enough she sees.

If she looks long enough she sees how he has died a thousand deaths that were not his own.

He is seizing her by the arm before she's even registered the threat. He draws her body behind his own. Roughened leather gloves, large and warm and firm. Pulls her down behind the stark white furniture. Gun in hand.

Then it happens.

The back exit to the kitchen opens. Out walks one of the kitchen workers. Marty, as Evelyn knows him. He has thick grey hair that sticks out every which way and age lines that define his shrewd features. His untiring and unconventional cheer is so ill placed that many workers steer a wide breadth and call it that of a deranged man. But Evelyn has sought refuge in his kitchens. In his ceaseless sanguinity. In smiley face pancakes and applesauce cake. Dr. Seuss and _Green Eggs and Ham. The Stubborn Zax,_ as he would recite with a flourish only Marty could _._ And each day Evelyn would visit his kitchen he would look at her and say, ' _Find the smile_.' She'd ask him how. He'd smile again and say, ' _Find the smile_.'

She hears the shout now from beside her, sees the movement from her side.

Too late. It will be too late. The distance is too far. The line of fire just right. Not even he will be fast enough.

Evelyn knows this. So must he.

Still he moves.

The bullets hit Marty in the chest with considerable force. The older man staggers and then crumples. Collateral damage. The agents do not blink; they reload.

A bullet splinters drywall, but he is already upon them. The first lies sprawled. Unmoving. Evelyn does not remember how. The second he has disarmed in a one step maneuver. A snap of limb. The third falls in a heap of blows received and none delivered.

And Evelyn is on her knees at Marty's side. She is pressing fabric to his chest as if it might hold him together.

It doesn't.

She looks to the tall, menacing stranger, the bodies strewn at his feet. He is looking at her with what she never sees in this prison of fortitude, what she never sees in cold, dead, sycophant agents who feel nothing of collateral damage. His eyes are burning with a loss that is not his own. The loss of a stranger. Of old Marty and _The Stubborn Zax._

She wonders how many pieces of one's self one could lose and still remain.

And Evelyn knows what's different now, what's different about him than the last. Because he sees what she had not.

Because it's not enough. It will never be enough.

Why rescue one, only to lose another?

There's blood pooling under her hand but she does not release the pressure. Marty's hand grips hers then with surprising strength. He looks up at her through glazed eyes and before his grip slackens and his eyes close, he smiles and whispers, " _Find the smile_."

Evelyn cannot.


	6. Eyes of a Child

The alarm shrills. A shattered silence.

She does not ask of time remaining.

They hunt him unremittingly now. As they do each time he dares enter their fortress to bring destruction and justice and so much more.

He does not let her lead. He takes the vanguard as Evelyn indicates poorly lit corridors, passages, neglected routes.

Her steps are irregular, in fits and bursts to each wayward breath, ungainly compared to the tireless eloquence of the man before her. There's a tear in the right sleeve of his overcoat. Dark crimson smears; less his own than not. A large black canvas shoulder bag is over his left shoulder. Evelyn does not ask its contents. She thinks she knows. Dark crimson smears. Fallen bodies—agents. How many have there been? Evelyn has lost count. Yet unwinded he remains, when Evelyn's own breathes heave and sweat plasters her hair to her forehead. _Who are you?_ Evelyn wants to ask. _Special Forces? Ranger, Delt, SEAL?_

Who's guardian angel will he be today? The new arrival in room nineteen? The man from room eleven whose screams she hears every night without reprieve? The teenage boy who gripped her hand and pleaded for something she cannot give?

Too many. There are too many. Too many faces.

Because it will only be one. It's only ever one. One new identity, one at a time. Samaritan's rival can only do this much, Evelyn knows. She might ask why. She doesn't. She does not ask at all. There's safety in silence. If such a thing as safety exists.

They are in a narrow passageway with crumbling flooring and flickering light fixtures above them. At its end is a left corner that takes them to the main hallway. To the holding rooms.

He edges out with his gun trained ahead of him, keeping Evelyn's body behind his own.

Empty.

They do not stop to wonder for how long.

The alarm shrills—an emergency light in the corner strobes to its rhythm. Below it is a camera that a single shot from his silenced pistol shatters.

Evelyn does not ask how he knows which room. She suspects she knows. And when he stops in front of room four she thinks there must be some kind of mistake. Perhaps he will enter the code and realize. Perhaps he means room five, or even three.

He doesn't.

The door is simple. Standard size like all the rest. Stainless steel with no window. A four-button keypad which clicks open when the correct sequence is entered.

And Evelyn does not remember him entering the sequence, though he must have because the door clicks open, a shift of bolts and metal. Evelyn opens her mouth to speak but no words form. Does he not know? Does he not know it's too late? Why does it guide him here, where nothing remains?

The room is small, unadorned. He fills its entirety the moment he crosses the threshold. A single lamp in the corner offers scant light. A bed—a wooden slab with a thin mattress— is against the back wall.

It is here the little girl sits.

She is small, small for her eight years. Her feet don't reach the floor. Her shoulders are turned inward, an unnatural rigidity. An inertness. Her gaze shifts ascetically. Involuntary. And it is not presence but absence that emanates the worst kind of calamity. A thin white T-shirt and faded yellow trousers hang from her frame—too big. Scuffed ballet flats. An oval face. Pale. Dirt-smeared. Battered.

Bright orange hair.

It's ephemeral, but Evelyn sees it. She sees it as his eyes rake over the child, cataloging every tear, every shadow. Every bruise.

Never has she seen such anger.

With each sweep of his eyes it ignites further until Evelyn begins to question savior or foe.

Then it's gone.

He is folding himself down to the little girl's level. Dark predator to gentle giant. He is speaking and words matter less than cadence. He is beckoning – offering and not taking, and Evelyn realizes she has forgotten its face. Narcissism and brokenness so consume, she has forgotten the face of kindness. She looks. And remembers.

The little girl eyes him but does not respond. Evelyn wonders if he knows. Evelyn wonders if he knows the child no longer speaks.

He is sliding the bag from his shoulder, overcoat pooling the floor in a dark halo. Evelyn glimpses the barrel of a large rifle, and so at odds it is with the manner in which he kneels before the child, endeavoring to minimize inherent stature, that she can't quite comprehend.

He produces an object. It is faded and torn but unmistakable.

A child's pink backpack.

Evelyn sees the change then, if only subtle at first. The little girl's eyes widen perceptibly. There's a flicker of something.

With a care unbefitting of his caliber, he lifts the doll from inside. It is made of soft fabric with painted features and wool for hair. Well-worn and well-loved, with stained feet and patches and a tattered dress.

And Evelyn's throat is suddenly too big, a throbbing pulse.

Because the little girl is reaching for the doll.

And Evelyn was wrong.

It's not too late.

Eight-year old Elva hugs the tattered rag doll to her chest with thin arms—arms mottled with bruises, a vivid mapwork of yellow and purple, of grips too tight and malignity most heinous—and smiles; brittle and fleeting, yet extant.

Evelyn had forgotten how.

Evelyn remembers.

Evelyn remembers Marty and _The Stubborn Zax._ Evelyn remembers fortitude and kindness and a child's unending resilience. And realizes.

It's enough.

She looks to the man with the darkest shadows, the kindest heart, and realizes it matters not how many he saves. How many he cannot. When he appears. How frequently. Only that he does.

Because he has bestowed upon them something infinitely more precious than the sum of lives saved and lost. Something sentient and inherently human that Samaritan, for all its brilliance and domination, will never understand.

Hope.

Elva sits straighter, a spark of wondrous curiosity in her eye, and Evelyn thinks the child means to hug him.

She does something even more extraordinary.

She speaks.

"I knew you'd come," she says, soft but certain, face pressed to the doll's woolen hair. "I saw you," she tells him, and it's triumphant—matter-of-fact, as if such a thing could be none other. She lifts her chin as she looks at him. "You were in the park," she says simply. "And I saw you. I saw you and I knew you'd come save me."

He his still. Raw. Formidable and fragile all at once. The child places her arms around him then, doll in hand, dangling incongruous against his back as she hugs his neck.

Evelyn watches his arms fold tentatively around the little girl's frame. She watches hands she has seen capable of unmatched violence lift the child with unassuming gentleness.

She removes the crumpled piece of paper from her pocket. Because ghosts persist, an aura that surrounds, and Evelyn suspects he could stand in a room full of people and still stand alone.

She presses the crumpled paper into his hand, telling him without words.

It's enough.


	7. Epilogue

He stands contiguous to the main pathway, amalgamating seamlessly. Undetected.

Further up the path mother and daughter walk.

Nia holds her daughter's hand. It's too small, smaller now than before, skin stretched over dainty bones. But it's warm, pulse thrumming against her palm. Alive.

Intangible is the child's presence felt, and inexplicably the parkgoers are drawn, if perhaps only fleetingly. It would be a falsehood to say she walks unmarred, that she ever would again. Such calamities could not be denied and the people were likely too jaded to do so. Yet her presence brings something too difficult to name.

It stands undefeated.

And remains.

~o~

He watches from the shadows.

From his pocket he removes the crumpled piece of paper and smoothes it open. Though the images drawn in pencil are adroitly delineated, suggesting a mature hand, the candor of such depiction speaks only to that belonging to a child. Monsters in the dark, sketched in bold with heinous faces. A little girl with tangled hair standing in portent. Shielding the girl from the monsters, from the dark, stands a man in a suit.

In Queensbridge Park the enigmatic man in the shadows looks down at the little girl's sketch on tattered and crumpled paper and does not move until long after mother and daughter's retreating figures have disappeared from sight and the sun has fallen well below the horizon.

Somewhere in the distance the gentle giant smiles.


End file.
